Enlightenment.

Now, lets get passionate ...

I tell you, I'm so sick of people talking about enlightenment. All these guys and dolls in white clothes and smarmy smiles telling us how it could be if only ...

If only what?

If only we could not be who we are, what we are, different to ourselves, better than ourselves, in another state of mind, in a different reality to the one we're in ...

A more compelling kind of self hatred I have never come across than when people start blathering about how they want to be enlightened. I ask them what they mean - and most tell me different versions of the same thing - a kind of annihilistic dreaming, a subtle death of self in which they become somehow perfect by destroying their 'self'.

This dream of perfection is like the dream of a perpetual motion machine (although I hear some guy in England has invented one) - impossible.

The nature of the universe is flux between chaos and order, involving the birth and death of everything. Why? Simply because the universe is totally out of whack. Even at the most fundamental level it is made from opposing energies of positive and negative trying to reconcile, creating all the side-effects we know as 'reality' in the process.

The only perfection possible is when positive and negative become one - and the only way that can happen is in non-being - death.

But still people dream, wish, desire enlightenment.

And that's not so bad. My point is, the enlightenment they dream of is so spectacularly unattainable that it distorts everything they do in their journey to it. They'd be better off not bothering to think about enlightenment and just live a good life. (Yeah yeah Max, I know you disagree)

But ... I figure if you're going to aspire to such a thing, you have to at least give it space to exist as something attainable. So when I wrote 'Love & Imagination' I tried to do that, largely to put the issue to rest for myself.

So following piece is what I came up with (still not finished).

I'd write something new, but I don't have time right now. I have to get back to writing my novel ... plus this piece says what I want to say better than I can say in in my current fictional frame of mind.

So, if you find the following disagrees with you, by all means tell me why. On such a ridiculous speculation it will cost me nothing to admit I don't know what I'm talking about.

Enlightenment or, as it is otherwise known, ‘Nirvana’ or ‘Nibbana’, or ‘Liberation’, is the holy grail of most who have made meditation the main focus of their life. Many teachers profess to be enlightened, or pretend to it, many are famous for it, and there are many radically different views of what it actually is.

The Buddha said of enlightenment, “There is a sphere of influence that is beyond the entire field of matter, the entire field of mind, that is neither this world nor another world nor both, neither moon nor sun. This I call neither arising, nor passing away, nor abiding, neither dying nor rebirth. It is without support, without development, without foundation. This is the end of suffering.”

Many people have turned this simple description into an impossible fantasy, in which they assume that the Buddha is speaking of another dimension to which one is somehow transported when we become enlightened - a place where all the other enlightened people are – the equivalent of the Christian notion of ‘heaven’.

Others are seduced into believing that enlightenment is an ‘altered state’, and at the first sign of bliss, or some ecstatic vision in meditation, they believe they have become enlightened, often with disastrous consequences.

The mistake they all make is in trying to understand enlightenment with an unenlightened mind, which needs to fit everything into what it already knows. But enlightenment by definition can only exist beyond the boundaries of our current experience. For this reason, enlightenment cannot be anticipated, or created. It can only be experienced.

In the same way, it cannot be described. For this reason, the Buddha never actually describes enlightenment, so much as indicate it by specifying all the things it isn’t.

In this, he is not indicating a different physical state to the one we already have, nor is he speaking of another magical place. The world stays the same. The only change is that all the ‘stuff’ of the world as it exists in the mind – namely concepts, memories, desires, fears, worries – is let go. In the bare awareness that is left, all that remains is enlightenment.

The venerable Thich Naht Hanh affirmed this when he said, “Nirvana is the extinction of all notions. Birth is a notion. Death is a notion. Being is a notion. Non-being is a notion. In our daily lives, we have to deal with these relative realities. But if we touch life more deeply, reality will reveal itself in a different way.”

This 'reality beyond reality' is revealed when we have learnt the skill of being able to let go of each sense moment in almost the same instant as we become aware of it. In this our life experience passes through our senses unencumbered by the reactions, concepts and habits we usually harness it with. In this continuous state of flow, the mind is calm, aware and insightful, no matter what happens.

This is freedom from suffering. After all, it was our mental habit of incessantly bouncing between all our attachments that created our suffering in the first place.

In describing enlightenment, many have resorted to the notion of ‘emptiness’ – they speak of it as ‘no mind, or a ‘void’. From this, we could mistakenly infer that enlightenment must be some profoundly nihilistic state, in which we have annihilated everything that we are and become nothing. It also implies that enlightenment is tantamount to a profound state of mental apathy, or vacantness.

And when we find out that the ultimate objective of every dedicated Buddhist monk or nun is to extinguish all mental attachments, habits, addictions and cravings, once again we could perhaps assume that, with all habits gone, only a mental void would remain. After all, for most of us, our desires, habits and fears are the entire concern of our life, so surely without these things we would be reduced to apathetic idiocy?

But enlightenment is nothing like this.

I've practised with two enlightened men, and both of them were extraordinarily dynamic, decisive people, with wonderful senses of humour and incisive intellects. The only major difference between them and me was that they were transcendently aware. As such they had total command of their conditioned Self, whereas my conditioned Self still had command of me.

The notion of ‘emptiness’ does not refer to any lack of intellect. The mind always generates thoughts and habits. Rather emptiness refers specifically to the lack of any compelling reaction to what arises. Reactions still arise, but they have no power and do not distort the body chemistry or the mind set. From the detachment of awareness, the enlightened mind knows all that arises within itself and, if it has no use for it, lets go of it immediately.

We see the beginnings of this profound detachment even as we practise meditation and mindfulness.

We practice ‘separating the chaff from the hay’, so to speak - highlighting the functional, what is appropriate - and letting go of all the rest – all the conditioned thought pollution that only wastes mental energy - reactions, desires and fears.

As a result, all the mental smoke that usually blocks our awareness becomes transparent and unimportant. An apparent ‘emptiness’ appears. As one of the first Zen masters in China, 1st Patriarch Damo, said in AD 526, 'True merit consists in pure awareness, wonderful and perfect. Its essence is emptiness.’

And from out of this apparent void our true intelligence appears. This intelligence does not arise as thoughts, nor is it even localised to our singular Self, as we have seen.

It arises from the spaces, the infinite potential between our thoughts, in much the same way as the quantum particles of all the material universe arise from the void of potential that appears as empty space.

Part of our problem with understanding enlightenment is that it has been so mythologised and romanticised, largely by those who have never experienced it. They speak of it as some kind of earth shattering revelation, a dramatic epiphany, in which we are suddenly turned into angelic creatures.

But unlike these romantic myths, enlightenment is not a burst of heavenly light in which we are made gods, nor is it necessarily a sudden epiphany of the spirit as many think, although in rare circumstances it can seem to occur like that.

More usually, enlightenment occurs as a long series of insights and realisations, in which the mind gradually softens and lets go of all its attachments, piece by piece. ‘Enlightenment must come little by little, otherwise it would overwhelm.’ (see note 1)

As such, once it has formed itself, it is actually quite a mundane state, in which, as a result of mindfulness and meditation, we have simply lost the mental mud that most people spend their lives puddling about in.

The Buddha said in the Mahayana Sutra: ‘If we are not hampered by our confused subjectivity, this our worldly life is an activity of Nirvana.’

Life goes on, nothing is enhanced, nothing glows brighter than it is. There is no substantial change in physicality, or place, or even of perception when enlightenment occurs. The basic personality characteristics of the person remain essentially the same. As the Zen saying goes: “Before I was enlightened, I chopped wood and carried water. After I became enlightened I chopped wood and carried water.”

The difference is that our Self sees itself very clearly, and knows its limitations. Where before our conditioned Self thought it was our entire universe, now it knows it is merely functional - a temporary vehicle for our life experience.

And though this life experience is precious, it is not so precious that we must suffocate it by clinging to it, or filling it with greed, because we know now that awareness is not confined to this brief spark of life.

So, as Longchenpa, a 14th century Tibetan Buddhist Master says:
Since everything is but an apparition,
Perfect in being what it is,
Having nothing to do with good or bad,
Acceptance or rejection,
One may well burst out in laughter

Enlightenment is not something we get, nor do we own it, or make it. It exists within us already, only needing to be revealed.

And it reveals itself slowly.

There is no before or after – no flash of light. Our enlightenment becomes realised in many minute stages, each a mixture of intention, patience, awareness and love.

And life is always leading us to enlightenment. It leads us by giving us momentary tastes of our latent enlightenment - little glimpses of the divine that appear in our art, music, and in the natural world around us – the birds, the trees, and those special moments of magic that we all experience from time to time.

In unguarded moments, enlightenment keeps gently tugging at our sleeve, begging us to follow it - when we make love, when we are fascinated, or moved to tears, or in a state of innocent wonder.

A friend once described listening to Mozart as “disappearing into perfection for a while’”.

We also experience moments of enlightenment in the exhilaration of challenge, when we are absorbed in something we love doing. “In a chess tournament, players whose attention has been riveted, for hours, to a logical battle on the board claim that they feel that they have been merged into a powerful ‘field of force’…”

A taste of enlightenment occurs when we give from a heart that needs no reward, or recognition, or when we appreciate someone else’s triumph, or good fortune. At that moment we lose our name, our title and race and we become simply alive.

(All the photos in this particular post were done by my girlfriend Kristen ... aren't they beautiful? Especially the ones of our bathroom window.)

Note:
1. Shah,Idries, Seeker After Truth, Octagon Press, London, 1992